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Amaker’s Move Creates a Clash of Harvard Ideals

One week after the Harvard men’s basketball program was cleared by a five-month Ivy League investigation into its recruiting practices, Coach Tommy Amaker continued his aggressive overhaul of the team.

One by one, Amaker called five players into his office before classes began in early September and told them they no longer had spots on the team. The five players included all three sophomores on the team, each of whom started games last season.

Amaker said they were welcome to play on the junior-varsity team, but did not have varsity roster spots and could not participate in the preseason workouts and conditioning work, the players said. The move cleared room for Harvard’s heralded seven-man freshman recruiting class.

Amaker’s decision to cut the players recruited by his predecessor — while not unusual outside the Ivy League — has raised eyebrows in the conference and has angered the players, their parents and coaches. Their main point of contention is that Amaker did not allow the players to compete for spots, going against the university’s athletic mission statement, and instead cleared them out to make room for his own players.

“I’m not sure I know too many situations like that,” said Roby, who is now Northeastern’s athletic director. “Five guys is a lot of guys. It is a little strange, especially in the Ivy League.”

Because the players were not told by Amaker of his decision until they were registered for classes in September, they could not transfer to another university.

Harvard’s current roster on its Web site has 14 players, but as recently as late last week it showed 20, which is inordinately large for a college team. Those who were cut questioned why they were not given notice sooner.

“Notification during the spring or summer would have been ideal and understandable,” said the sophomore Kyle Fitzgerald, who started two games last season. “I am not sure of the reason of this delay, and if it was just a mistake, how the department could permit such a mistake to be made.”

Harvard’s associate director of athletics, Sheri Norred, said, “While the department is obviously sorry to disappoint any student-athlete, even with necessary roster changes, we have the utmost confidence in Coach Amaker’s ability to judge talent and treat his athletes fairly.”

Amaker did not return a call to his cellphone or an e-mail message. The athletic director, Bob Scalise, did not return a telephone message.

Longtime Ivy observers said that Amaker’s roster change was without precedent in the league. Coaches at Brown, Yale and Cornell have completed successful overhauls of their programs in the last decade without forcing an exodus.

“Everything that Harvard stands for is character and standards for academics,” said Rob Pavinelli, who coached one of the jettisoned players, T. J. Carey, at St. Dominic High School in Oyster Bay, N.Y. “To me, not giving the kids a chance to compete seems like it goes against everything that Harvard believes in.”

Photo

Coach Tommy Amaker cut five players he inherited from his predecessor.Credit
Josh Haner/The New York Times

Fitzgerald, Carey and Adam Demuyakor, all sophomores, started games last season. Carey declined to comment. Carey’s father, Tom, said among the things that bothered him was that his son spent $1,000 of his own money on airfare and a hotel room to work at Amaker’s basketball camp in August.

“If you want to cut my son, fine,” said Tom Carey, whose son turned down Princeton and Yale to attend Harvard. “You could have done it last year. Give them the opportunity to move on.”

Demuyakor declined to go into detail about the situation, but said in a brief telephone interview: “This has been a tough situation for all of us. I’d rather not go down saying anything at all about the team or anyone in the program.”

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Demuyakor’s summer basketball coach, the former Columbia star and assistant Buck Jenkins, said he wondered if Harvard’s actions were a sign that things were changing since he played in the Ivy League in the early 1990s.

“Adam had scholarship offers from Division I schools,” Jenkins said. “He chose Harvard because of the unique opportunity for an Ivy League education and to play Division I basketball. For that to be taken from him, it seems like something is wrong.”

The other two players, Ndu Okereke and Darryl Finkton, played sparingly last season. Finkton said in an e-mail message that he would probably not have been medically cleared to play this season because of four knee operations.

Finkton’s high school coach, Doug Mitchell of North Central High School in Indianapolis, said he was disappointed with the way Amaker handled the situation. Mitchell, who coached the N.B.A. first-round draft choice Eric Gordon, said the proper protocol would have been for Amaker to give the player’s high school coach a courtesy call.

“Why would you wait for them to come back to tell them?” said Mitchell, who has coached for USA Basketball’s youth programs. “What if a kid wanted to transfer to Yale?”

In the Ivy League, whose universities do not offer athletic scholarships, Harvard’s hiring of Amaker after his dismissal at Michigan two years ago was seen as a sea change for the program. Harvard, which fired Coach Frank Sullivan, has never won an Ivy basketball title and has not reached the N.C.A.A. tournament since 1946. Amaker’s team went 8-22 last season.

Under Amaker, Harvard has adopted a more aggressive approach to recruiting, as outlined in a New York Times article that precipitated the investigation. Along with considering recruits who were seen by rival coaches as having lower academic profiles, Harvard also recruited two players who said they played pickup games with the assistant Kenny Blakeney before he was hired.

The Ivy League ruled that Blakeney’s actions were not against N.C.A.A. rules. The league’s commissioner, Jeff Orleans, said he was confident in the independent nature of the investigation.

Harvard, the conference said in its statement, “complied with all relevant Ivy League obligations.” Harvard also denied that it had lowered its academic standards.

In addition to the five players cut by Amaker, two other players will also not return to the team. The junior-college transfer Cem Dinc, whose academic credentials were questioned by rival coaches, said he would not be playing this season in order to focus on school and enjoy college life at Harvard. Another player, the junior Alex Blankenau, left in the spring.

“They asked these young men to come to Harvard with a commitment and promise to play basketball,” said Blankenau’s father, Don. “A number of those young men worked for years and followed through on their end. Harvard then denies them this. That undercuts the ethical standards of the athletic department.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SP12 of the New York edition with the headline: Amaker’s Move Creates a Clash of Harvard Ideals. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe